[tibbar]

It’s depressing, honestly. A few years ago I read a graduate textbook about Bitcoin as well as the original white paper and some papers about ethereum, etc. My main takeaway is that Bitcoin itself (although not all blockchain proposals) is a horrible medium for almost all useful products. The privacy properties are bad, it’s incredibly inefficient, and everyone ends up going to a middleman instead of interacting in a decentralized way as it is. Almost always, a regular database is what you want. The drumbeat of cries ‘let’s build X, but on a blockchain!’ rarely even make sense.

This is compounded by the fact that the people who promote Bitcoin the most in my personal circles are known to be experts in wishful thinking and outlandish claims about the world in general.

Having said that, smart contracts are actually really cool. In practice a bank is probably just as good in the developed world but — darn it, I want to make clever money programs too. Also, there are alt coins that have much better privacy preserving properties and superior (energy efficient) consensus algorithms so there are still reasons to be hyped. It’s just that most of the web3 stuff doesn’t seem to touch the actually interesting possibilities in favor of ‘go blockchain, Bitcoin to the moon!’